For ‘Zero Waste Week’, Krzysztof Krajewski, Chief Innovation & Sustainability Officer, RDM Group, is looking at waste from the start of the chain rather than the end, and calling for recycling to be considered across the whole supply chain, not just at the disposal stage.
He commented, “If we are serious about zero waste, we need to stop thinking of waste as something that happens when a package reaches the bin. Much of the waste we create is determined long before that point, by what materials we choose, how we design packaging and whether we build a second life for those materials into the pack from the very beginning.
“This is why the industry needs to look beyond simply making packaging lighter or putting a ‘recyclable’ claim on it. A lighter pack is not necessarily a less wasteful pack if it relies more heavily on virgin material, while a recyclable pack made entirely from virgin fibre is still introducing new material into the system rather than making better use of what is already there.
“The real opportunity is to design waste out of the system. Where recycled fibre can deliver the required performance, using it from the outset means we are giving existing materials another life, rather than continually bringing new resources into the system while valuable material from previous lives is lost. Paper fibres can be recycled many times – 25 times or more to be exact – so the value of that material can be retained through multiple lives.”
Krajewski concluded, “Zero Waste Week should therefore be a challenge to think beyond the bin. We shouldn’t just be asking how we dispose of packaging more effectively; we should be asking why valuable material should become waste in the first place. The ultimate measure of progress is not simply how little packaging we use, but how effectively we keep the materials we already have in circulation, designing packaging so that waste is prevented, not simply managed, at the end of its life.”
